Adventures in Budgeting

Everyone is trying to cut back these days. Everywhere we turn we hear more gloom and doom about the economy, especially the stock market. We’re all tightening our belts, and my house is no exception. We started this process by cutting down or out miscellaneous spending and trips, staying with family for the trips we do take, and skipping the restaurants in favor of home cooked meals. When our budget remained a bit tight, we added scheduling drives into town (we live about 15 miles out) so we could get things done with minimal use of gas, and we started a garden (yes, it is done now – I’ll post more on that later), and I turned into the electricity nazi (“TURN OFF the light when you leave the room!”). We’re doing fine at this point, but I have sort of gotten into the spirit of things, so we are trying an experiment based on the 30 Days, $30 experiment by the author of the blog Less Is Enough.

After discussion with dear hubby, we decided $1 per day per person was not practical for our family. For one thing, my husband eats more than $1 worth of food every day no matter how cheap the food is. For another we have a 5 year old who needs balanced nutrition. So we have decided to plan as low budget meals as humanly possible and to use what we already have in the pantry as often as humanly possible (our natural tendency is to keep an overstocked pantry, most of which never gets used) and to keep track of every single food purchase to come up with a realistic weekly budget. We just started this past weekend, so we don’t have a lot of data yet, but by the end of the month we should have a rough idea of how much it will take to feed us. This is, unfortunately, going to impact my weight loss efforts. I have been eating meal replacements from my doctor’s office, but in the budget cuts those went away. I am going to continue my diet preparing my own foods in the appropriate proportions, so hopefully I will still reach my goal by then end of April as planned. I’ll post more on that later too.

Anyway, in my efforts to be both frugal and healthy I have been searching the net for tips and articles, and this is one of the best I found. It is from the blog Divine Caroline, which I had never heard of before today, but I will certainly be visiting again.